


In All Things, Triumph

by shit-escalates (Schm0use)



Category: Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown
Genre: Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 07:11:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4657353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schm0use/pseuds/shit-escalates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His peers think him untouchable. His mentors think him perfection. His mother thinks him a failure.</p><p>But nobody knew the boy Priam really was, and now, nobody ever will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In All Things, Triumph

_“I think they will rather surprise you,” Priam says in defense of the far end of the table. [...] “I do not think it charity to say that they will be the spine of our group.” - Red Rising_ , Ch. 18

* * *

The baby is a few minutes old, and the mother holds it like a dead thing. She looks at the angelic nose and soft lips, and beckons a Brown servant near. She hands him the baby. “Take it to the Rock.”

For three days, the Golden babe is left exposed, naked, to the elements. When the Brown servant retrieves it at dawn on the fourth day, its skin is frozen and blistering, and its cries whisper from a throat torn by overuse. When its mother sees it back in its marble crib that afternoon, she raises an eyebrow.

“Unexpected.” She says, and carries on.

 

Priam is five, and he sits straighter, talks clearer, listens better than all the other children. He watches as others his age run and tumble and fall over each other at parties, in green grass gardens and white sand beaches. 

Sometimes he feels a twitching in his feet, and a slumping in his shoulders. And he wants to trip and shout and ignore the world around him.

Then he remembers his mother’s hand, cold like ice and grasping like metal upon his neck, every time before they leave their manor house. She always digs her thumbs into his shoulder blades, forcing his posture into perfection. He has bruises on each shoulder. Priam sits up even straighter.

 

Priam is ten, and his cheeks are stinging. His eyes are, too, but he will not cry. His mother slaps him again.

“Do not ever,” she hisses, “let me catch you associating with _their kind_ again.”

He doesn’t understand why his mother dislikes Bronze-Golds. But at the next gala he ignores the boy who bested him in mock combat, who he wrestled with and laughed with, their smiles the same but different; one ugly, one beautiful. 

They are not the same. They are different. 

 

Priam is fifteen, and he is out of breath, and his hand is cut from an accident in his training exercises. _Disappointing_ , he thinks to himself. _Always so disappointing_. His lungs are burning and his stomach churns and he wants to stop but he can not. His mother’s voice is in his head.

“Just because you are golden does not mean you are Gold.” She says. “A Gold wields power. A Gold demands respect. A Gold inspires _fear_.” 

Her lip curls when she looks at him, the same way it did the day he was born. Priam is broad-shouldered and tall, and he is skilled with a Razor, and his tutors love him, but his mother does not. Because she knows, as much as he does, that no one will ever fear eyes as gentle as his.

 

Priam is sixteen, and has been designated a Premier. His mother didn’t trust him to be chosen as a highDraft. Still, she expects him to embarrass her.

Now he stands naked in a stone cell. Across from him stands a Bronze boy with a vicious expression. 

They move quickly, struggling and striking in the dark. The small boy is deceptively strong, wild and terrifying like some beastly predator. Priam fears this boy. But he also recognizes him. Once upon a time, they were almost friends.

He is unsure whether he is overpowered, or whether he gives in. After all, he has lost to this boy before. His windpipe is being crushed. He is not in pain - he is merely suffocating. He is dying.

His last thought is that it might be better to die at the hands of an almost friend, than live the rest of his life disappointing the only person who ever truly knew him. 


End file.
